At present, wireless telecommunication technology is developing towards broadband and high data rate, and new technology and new technological standard are emerging continuously.
In 802.16/802.16e networks, after initial ranging and network entry procedure, service connection should be set up between mobile station (MS) and base station (BS) for them to transfer data service. To be specific, MS would send Dynamic Service Addition-Request (DSA-REQ) to BS to request connection for the service. BS would respond with Dynamic Service Addition-Response (DSA-RSP) to MS to notify the MS to use the transmission path determined by the corresponding connection identification (CID) to carry the data service.
The above-mentioned example has not taken into consideration the relay station (RS). In order to solve the problem of the bandwidth and communication distance between MS and BS, RS has been introduced between MS and BS.
In mobile multi-hop relay networks, scheme which is similar to non-relay network is needed for the connection setup. A simple way of connection setup in mobile multi-hop relay networks is that the RS transparently relays the DSA-REQ and DSA-RSP between MS and BS, and also transparently relays the data service between MS and BS.
For the solution that RS transparently relays the DSA-REQ signal, DSA-RSP signal and data service, it has some drawbacks as follows:
(1). There would be only one transmission path between MS and BS, and it would be very likely to get congested.
(2). Different service connections between the same (MS, BS) pair which is comprised of a MS and a BS may have to use the same path, which would violate the principle of providing differentiated Quality of Service (QoS) for different services.
(3). The resource allocation would not be optimized, as under this framework the load balance and service merging would be very difficult for implementation.
Therefore, although the aforementioned solution is simple, a more flexible and intelligent method would have to be found.